Derby Day (52 page)

It was now about eleven o’clock. Belgrave Square was almost empty, and the white cat had gone to sleep on a cushion on the drawing-room sofa. It occurred to Mrs Rebecca that the day was her own and that she could do what she chose with it: walk into the West End, if she had a mind, and set half a dozen milliners and dressmakers scrambling at her feet. But to do this, she knew, she would need money. Accordingly, she repaired to Mr Happerton’s study, knowing that there was a drawer of his desk in which loose notes and sovereigns sometimes lay, and it was here, scrunched up among a heap of silver coins that she found that other note. It was the most innocuous scrap of paper you ever saw, cerise-coloured, with the words written on it in a neat, slanting hand, saying something about being eternally obliged, pleasantly delighted and so forth. It was plainly written by a woman – what man ever says that he is eternally obliged or pleasantly delighted? – and it was signed
Your own R.W
. Mrs Rebecca read the note through three times before its implications occurred to her, but then they took her by the throat.
Your own R.W
. There was no doubt about it. She threw the scrap of paper – which had now become a hot thing – down on the desktop, as if the very touch of it might contaminate or burn her hand. There was a poker among the fire-irons next to the grate and a cut-glass representation of a racehorse on the mantelpiece, and before Mrs Rebecca properly knew what she was doing she had seized the poker and sent the little statuette flying into smithereens. The noise of it – in the silence of the deserted house it seemed like an explosion – rather frightened her, and she let the poker drop to the floor.

Your own R.W
. There was no getting away from it. Her first thought was a vast, implacable resentment. She had placed her trust in someone, and compromised herself in all sorts of ways on that person’s behalf, and that person had betrayed her. Some of the fragments of the glass horse were lying on the carpet next to her foot and she kicked at them. Then, suddenly, some of the complexities of the situation occurred to her and she began to think about Mr Happerton and his plans, the money that had been acquired on his behalf and the schemes in which she had been confederate. She no longer doubted that he and Mr Pardew had been in league. Why else should Mr Pardew have come to the house? Where else had Mr Happerton got the money that had not come from her? All this was very terrible to her. She knew that while a part of her hated Mr Happerton for his deceptions and his
Your own R.W
., another part of her admired him for his stratagems. At the same time the brooding, ruminative side of her nature would not release her from its grasp. It was as if the whole affair – her marriage, Tiberius, Mr Happerton’s striving after money, Captain Raff, Mr Pardew and the vacancy at the Chelsea Districts – was simply a gigantic puzzle crying out for her to solve. Still standing by the desk, she found herself instinctively trying others of its drawers. Most of them were locked, but on this occasion Mrs Happerton was equal to locked doors. There was a key lying on the mantelpiece, hidden under a pair of horseshoes, and pretty soon she had the drawers open and their contents spread out over the Turkey carpet, and herself seated beside them with her skirts hitched up to her knees and an expression on her face in which fury and cunning zealously commingled. If Mr Happerton himself had appeared at the study door and seen what was going on inside it, he would probably not have dared to enter.

After an hour Mrs Rebecca got to her feet. There was a little attaché case resting against a chair, and she picked it up, turned out its contents into the grate, and began to fill it with documents pillaged from the desk. A little later, with the case clutched tightly in her hands, she strode out into the hallway, ordered the kitchenmaid to summon her a cab, marched through the front door and into the square and had herself driven off eastwards towards the City.

*

The noise is quite overpowering: every visitor to the Derby remarks it: coach-horns sounding from the drags; the scrape of carriage-wheels on the broken turf; the cries of the cook-touts; bookmakers shouting their odds; half a dozen native dialects and a dozen foreign tongues mingled promiscuously together. Mr Pardew thinks, in no particular order, of Mr Fardel, his late associate, with his head stoved in upon the Pump Court cobbles, the Dover mail-train drawn up at London Bridge station, policemen’s whistles in Carter Lane, the red brick-dust on Mr Lythgoe’s shirtfront. The memories are distasteful to him, but he cannot slough them off. He will get out of this, he thinks. What dream of conquest was ever worth a rose garden in the sun, or dawn striking a water meadow? And for a moment the stick in his hand falls not upon a patch of once green grass trampled grey by a hundred thousand feet, but on a Wiltshire lane, leading on into chalk hills, nothingness and soft oblivion.

*

QUESTIONING OF THE WOMAN HAPPERTON:
BY CAPTAIN McTURK: MR MASTERSON ATTENDING

Captain McT
: You say that Mr Pardew came to your house, and was interviewed by your husband. Did he ever come before?

Mrs H
: Not to my knowledge. He may have done. There are many people wanting to speak to my husband.

Captain McT
: What kind of people? Come, you need not be shy.

Mrs H
: Men connected with his business. Sporting gentlemen.

Captain McT
: And some that are no gentlemen at all, I’ll wager. Was Captain Raff one of them?

Mrs H
: The most odious man in the world.

Captain McT
: What dealings do you imagine your husband had with Mr Pardew?

Mrs H
: I cannot tell. But I have seen Mr Pardew’s likeness in the newspaper. I think my husband has had money from him.

Captain McT
: Who else has your husband had money from, I wonder? Has he had it from Mr Gresham?

Mrs H
: I cannot see that it is any business of yours, but he has lent him money, certainly. Gentlemen very often do lend money to men who have married their daughters, I believe.

Captain McT
: And been poisoned by them into the bargain, I don’t doubt. Do you know the precise contents of that sleeping draught?

Mrs H
: There are no sleeping draughts in my house, I think.

Captain McT
: And yet you were seen concocting one. There is no use in denying it. Indeed there is not. How much money has he lent Happerton? Or had taken from him?

Mrs H
: It is no business of yours.

Captain McT
: Were Mr Gresham to die, it would certainly be my business. And the hangman’s too. I am sorry – do I alarm you?

Mrs H
: Defenceless women are always there to be frightened, I believe.

Captain McT
: Why did you come here, if you did not wish to be frightened?

Mrs H
: I came because I thought it my duty.

Captain McT
: I have been making a special study of your husband, Mrs Happerton. Why, there is enough evidence to convict him of grand larceny, fraud and several other crimes besides. What if I said it was my duty to arrest him this very afternoon?

Mrs H
: You must do as you think fit. It is nothing to me.

Captain McT
: I beg your pardon. It is everything. Until you came here I had made various deductions about your husband which I could not corroborate. Now I can. If he is to be taken, it will be your doing.

Mrs H
: You must do as you think fit.

Captain McT
: What has he done to you that you must betray him?

Mrs H
: I cannot say. Truly I cannot.

Captain McT
: But you would still be the agent of his doom?

Mrs H
: I have told you what I know. Is it not enough?

Captain McT
: More than enough.

*

‘That’s a cool piece,’ Captain McTurk said to Mr Masterson, as Mrs Happerton was led away. ‘Damns her husband to perdition and never turns a hair. I wonder what is at the bottom of it?’

‘That woman in Mount Street, I suppose. It is so very difficult to keep things private.’

‘Is that the case? Well, I’ve no doubt you’re right. I knew Mrs H. when she was in petticoats, you know.’

‘A charming girl, I dare say,’ said Mr Masterston.

‘Oh very. But I should not have cared to be the maid who combed her hair the wrong way. Now, the question is: what are we to do with Happerton? He is at the Derby, you say?’

‘I believe the race will be run in an hour.’

‘Well, we had best go and fetch him I think. If we let him set foot in Belgrave Square again there will be the devil to pay with lawyers. Besides, the sooner he tells us where that man Pardew is the better. And there is nothing like a little drama.’

‘No indeed,’ said Mr Masterson, who did not look as if he believed it.

‘And you had better have Hopkins send to Atterbury at the
Star
. There is nothing like a little publicity either.’

And Mr Masterson supposed that there wasn’t.

*

A moralist would be edified by Major Rook’s affectionate treatment of his young friend. He is determined to show him the Epsom sights, leads him benevolently among the booths and the sideshows, introduces him to his cronies at the rail, sits him down at their picnic spot and pours him a glass of champagne just as if he had paid for it himself. Champagne doesn’t agree with Mr Pigeon’s stomach, and neither does the cigar that Major Rook now lights for him with the most tremendous flourish, but he thinks, as his eye drifts over the tribes of people surging up the hill, that he is the most tremendous fellow that ever there was, that Major Rook is his true friend, and Maria the prettiest girl he ever saw, and this the greatest day he ever spent in his life, if only his head would not ache so and his hand not shake so tremulously on the carriage door.

*

Mr Gallentin, walking by the rail with his wife and daughters, spies the butterfly pin before seeing the person who is wearing it: a blue gleam that turns its surround into drabness. For a moment he wonders if he is mistaken, if his mind has led him astray, but no, it is the butterfly pin, right enough, and he stops and gapes at it amid a party of acrobats turning somersaults on the grass and a tipsy woman arguing with a broken-down old man in a nankeen jacket. There is a constable standing thirty yards away, with his back against the rail and a keen eye on the crowd swaying about him, who no doubt ought to be summoned, but Mr Gallentin finds that he can brook no delay in the seeing of the pin and the having of it. ‘You sir,’ he cries. ‘You there.’ The Misses Gallentin draw back in astonishment at seeing their papa so provoked. He is a tall man and well built, and his hand is on the wearer of the pin’s arm in a moment, but Mr Pardew is the equal of him.

‘I think you’ll find, sir, that you have made a mistake,’ he says, very equably, and Mr Gallentin, whose hand is grasping the arm with all his force, replies that he is not mistaken but knows a d——d thief when he sees one. This is too much for Mr Pardew, who twists easily out of his grasp, jabs upward with his stick and strikes Mr Gallentin in the short ribs, taking the wind out of his lungs and sending him crashing onto the grass, while the acrobats hastily disperse and the Misses Gallentin and their mother set up a cry that would rout out a catacomb. The policeman, summoned from the rail by a dozen voices, finds a fat man collapsed on one knee, with his hat off and his watch chain swinging like a pendulum, being attended to by a circle of outraged ladies. Of Mr Pardew, so thoroughly vanished as if he had never been, there was not the slightest sign.